I know that smog in the air can irritate my eyes. But is smog something that can get in my eyes - to the point where it has to be washed out?
So is smog, like pollen, something that can physically reside in your eyes, and continue to bother you minutes or hours after leaving the smog-laden atmosphere?
I’m fairly sure there’s somewhat less pollen inside my apartment than outside (at least with the windows closed), how about smog?
How useful would it be to wash smog out of my eyes, whether or not my apartment is more smoggy than outdoors?
Of course, as it’s made of physical particles which may end up on your eyeball. What would make you doubt that? It would have to be pretty bad for it to need washing out though, your eyes would be stinging I’d expect.
Where are you? Unless you’re in Beijing or somewhere like that, you probably have more pollution coming from things inside your home (such as plastics, dry cleaning, cleaning products and so on) that you have from external smog.
“Smog” isn’t a particular substance. It tends to be the generic term for an oxidant - usually ozone, although there are others as well. It’s typically in gas phase, so there’s not a lot to really “wash out.” I don’t know all the physical effects of ozone in the eye, but I do know that ozone is a strong oxidant, and will react fairly quickly with all sorts of biological materials. My guess is that is what is causing the irritation, and it may be that using an eyewash does wash out the reactants and so provides relief. So it may be that, despite my comment above, you do wash out some of the irritating material.
The general press tends to group air pollution into “soot” and “smog”, and they usually mean “particulate matter” and “ozone,” respectively. You can get particles in the eye, but most of the airborne particles are pretty small - the ones that are of concern from a health perspective are smaller than 10 microns, and the ones that of most concern are even smaller - usually less than 1 micron (although the official standard is set at 2.5 microns).
You probably can wash these out, but I’m not sure you would feel them as particles anyway.
I am told that oxides of nitrogen (NO[sub]X[/sub]) can form nitric acid (HNO[sub]3[/sub]) when it mixes with either the moisture in your lungs or the tears in your eyes.
So my vote would be yes, smog can get into your eyes.
NOX is not nearly the problem it was many years ago, but it does still exist.
Can’t say for sure whether the smog is worse outside than inside. I suspect not, but could be wrong. During the real bad smog days of yore, they’d bring us school kids in from outdoor PE and make us sit around in the gym. Looking back, I suspect this was more to get us out of the heat and not breathing so hard, rather than from any ideas about better air quality.
Technology marches on. The air is better in LA than it used to be. Though I am still a little dubious about breathing stuff that I can’t even see.
LA would be that yellow mark between the green and yellow marks (Ventura and Orange counties) towards the bottom of CA.
I was surprised at the colorations of counties like Inyo, Mono. Tuolumne, etc. I’d expect it in Marin, Francisco, Mateo, Cruz, but didn’t know there was that much activity in eastern CA that far north.
